Name: Crab-apple Jelly
Ingredients: juicy crab-apples; ½ cup water

Why it works: Crab and apple work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 343 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Crab-apple Jelly

Ingredients

juicy crab-apples
½ cup water

Directions

Prepare

Wash and quarter the crab-apples.
Place them in a preserving kettle over medium heat with ½ cup of water. Add more water if it evaporates.

Cook and strain

Boil the apples until they turn to pulp.
Strain the mixture through a flannel bag.
Proceed with making jelly as usual.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

Crab + appletop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together343 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Crab-apples: Provide the pectin and tart acidity that let the juice set into jelly.
Water: Creates steam and moisture so the apples soften and break down into pulp.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.